Advertising

Don’t Insult My Intelligence!

It Might Come Back To Haunt You!

How do you define “Spam”?

My definition follows along these lines:
The unwanted, unrequested, solicitation and multiple-delivery of junk advertising.

Yes you read that correctly. Believe it or not, Spam has been around for quite a long time. Our mail boxes get filled with it on a regular basis; the Sunday paper is full of it take out all the fliers and sales papers and what’s left is the same size as your daily paper. Or how many times have you driven to the mall and come back out to find your windshield covered in fliers? Some really big ones….. “Billboards”!

Enter the computer era and the age of the Internet…guess what? You got it! Spam’s reared its ugly head AGAIN! The only thing worse, then all the physical trash mail is the huge amounts of that “electronic” trash we call Spam. You’ve probably guessed by now I have not been referring to the canned meat either.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against Advertising by a long shot. Advertising has been around as long as Marketing has, literally thousands of years. Early Advertising was mainly by word of mouth or by the individual marketers “crying their wares” in open markets. In a lot of places around the world, you can still find these types of “Open Air Markets” still conducting business like it was done so many generations ago.

My Grand father was in the Advertising business for 40 years with a company named “Cheesebro Ponds”, which later became “Colgate-Palmolive. Do you remember when Bryl-cream first came out on the market? That was a hair cream for men and that company made a “Fortune” with that little jingle, “a little-dab-will-do-ya”. They didn’t go around “stuffing mail boxes, or plastering car”, just a small musical jingle helped make that product a “National Craze” for the longest time. It wouldn’t surprise me if you can still find that product on the store shelves either. Advertising and Marketing go hand in hand. Just like it has for over 2,000 years.

The problem we all face now, working on the Internet, is the unbelievable amounts of junk e mail (spam) that hits our in boxes several times a day. You could literally spend more time, re-adjusting your e mail spam filters than you do reading your mail! There are regulations in place regarding spam, but they still keep finding was to hit you with their trash mail.

And “Please” don’t try and tell me “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure!” Spam is use full for nothing but

• clogging up your in box,
• transmitting viruses in some cases,
• stealing personal information “Identity Theft”
• Scams that steal “Literally” Billions of dollars from YOU the individual. There are so many versions of this one, it’s unbelievable!

If you are going to do on line marketing, you should learn a proper way to do so. I have yet to see a program, affiliate or otherwise, that does not have the tools, and the training available to help their members learn how to write an e mail that is not insulting the readers intelligence, or overloading that mail with nothing but “Live, working, url’s”.

Then there are some writers that think they have to turn an 8 to 10 line (and even 10 lines is borderline to me) into a 60 line message that’s almost as long as some web pages or longer!” Not to forget the worst type of all. Those “Full Page” e mails that look more like a WORD SEARCH than an e mail!”

What ever happened to the “K.I.S.S” idea! You know, “Keep It Simple Silly”! I am more inclined to read an e mail that has a good subject line, content that’s short, to the point, and a minimal amount of links, than I am to read any of the ones I have described above. I would also be more apt to visit that author’s link just to find out a little more about what he or she was promoting.

So now you see the “Message” behind my Title. Shorter IS sometimes Better.

Here’s a forum where more on this topic is being discussed. Enjoy.